How social factors explain conformity
- Social factors include stimuli and influences from outside of the person. For example:
- Other people
- The physical environment
- The specific characteristics of the situation
- When an individual is part of a group they tend to wish to blend in with and belong to the group
- This may be an evolutionary mechanism that ensures survival as being a ‘lone wolf’ makes an individual vulnerable to threat (safety in numbers)
- Group membership is, particularly today, more about just survival though
- People like to be liked; they benefit from a sense of belonging to a community with shared beliefs, goals, and activities
- Conforming to the majority is likely to result in someone being included rather than excluded and socially isolated
- There are specific social factors that explain the extent to which an individual might conform:
- Group size: the more people that are in the group, the more likely conformity is to occur, however this increase does not go on indefinitely
- Conformity rates rise swiftly from one to three people but once the group size reaches four people the rate of conformity does not change from its established level e.g. if the conformity rate is 38% with four people it is unlikely to increase (or decrease) much beyond this level
- Anonymity: it is difficult to voice ideas or opinions that go against the group as this would risk rejection which means that even if people disagree with the group they are unlikely to say so openly
- When Asch ran a variation of his study in which participants could give their answers anonymously then conformity rates fell
- Task difficulty: if a task is difficult then people are more likely to conform to answers given by others as they may feel that they lack expertise in the task i.e. conformity is likely to increase
- When Asch introduced a more difficult line-judging task in another variation, he found that conformity did indeed increase in line with expectations
Conformity diagram
Four is the optimum group size in which conformity occurs
Evaluation of how social factors explain conformity
Strengths
- Each factor provides a valid explanation for why and how conformity to the majority occurs
Weaknesses
- Group size: Campbell & Fairey (1989) showed that a larger group size (8-10) determines higher conformity if the topic is based on personal preference e.g. taste in music
- Anonymity: Asch’s experiment used groups of strangers but when Huang & Li (2016) asked groups of friends to express opinions the conformity rate increased under the condition of anonymity
- Task difficulty: individual differences in ability, skill, knowledge and expertise may mean that some people are not affected by how difficult the task is
Exam Tip
Speaking of conformity and social influence…don’t be swayed or persuaded by your mates when they tell you that they are doing ‘no revision’ for their GCSE Psychology exam or that they are leaving it until the night before. Yes, of course, some of them may well make this TOTAL BLUNDER (!) of not preparing properly but, realistically, they probably ARE revising and have been doing so for a while. So make sure that you stick to YOUR plan, not theirs.